Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 1,535 posts.

Software Engineering
667

I'm not a fan of strlcpy(3)

strlcpy(3) is an OpenBSD function which is often hailed as a safer replacement for strcpy(3) and/or strncpy(3) . One of the obvious issues with strlcpy is that it's not safe if src isn't null-terminated. However, that's not the reason I don't like strlcpy. In fact despite knowing this, I used to think it was an okay…

681

The new APT 3.0 solver

APT 2.9.3 introduces the first iteration of the new solver codenamed solver3, and now available with the –solver 3.0 option. The new solver works fundamentally different from the old one. How does it work? Solver3 is a fully backtracking dependency solving algorithm that defers choices to as late as possible. It…

684

Stacking triangles for fun and profit

One thing you may have noticed about the trigonometric functions sine and cosine is that they seem to have no agreed upon definition. Or rather, different authors choose different definitions as the starting point, mainly based on convenience. This isn’t problematic or even particularly unusual in mathematics: as long…